RTVS Wins Editors Lab In Prague!

Posted:
09 November 2015

Author:
Karen Burke

A team of hackers from RTVS became the first winners of the new season of the Editors Lab 2015/2016 regional rounds in Prague on Friday. Journalists Peter Valovič and Michal Katuška, TV and radio anchor, Zuzana Hanzelova, and developer, Peter Matal, created a webpage to show the economic impact of a refugee living in Slovakia.

The prototype webpage also illustrated how long a refugee would have to save in order to buy certain products in Slovakia, such as shoes, clothes, a car, a phone, etc. “We then compared how long it would take a refugee to give all these spendings back following successful integration,” explained Zuzana Hanzelova. “We picked several occupations, minimum wage and average wage. According to each income, the webpage’s interactive features show how many years a refugee would have to work in order to return their expenses to the economy.”

The RTVS hack team’s webpage also compared refugees’ spendings to the annual costs for prison maintenance and healthcare costs for tobacco smokers. The team also wrote an article containing all the facts and comparing refugee costs in Slovakia to several notorious national corruption scandals.

Česká televize, Český rozhlas and KohoVolit.eureceived special mentions for their projects during the awards ceremony on Friday. The theme of the hackdays was ‘Covering the Refugees and Migrants Crisis with Data’. The teams explored how data could be used to improve people’s understanding of the journeys made by refugees and migrants through the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The hackers also looked at how data could shed more light on the economic and social impacts of migrations in both countries. People were able to follow The Editors Lab live through the Liveblog on the GEN website and the #EditorsLab hashtag on Twitter.

The GEN #EditorsLab in Prague was part of a series of international hackdays hosted by world-renowned media organisations in New York (The New York Times), London (The Guardian), Madrid (El País), Buenos Aires (Clarín), Paris (Le Parisien), and many more. It brought together teams representing news media outlets from all platforms (broadcast, online, print) in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The participants benefitted from tech talks given by Beata Biel representing Google News Lab, Marie Heřmanová representing the Open Society Foundation, Adam Rodriques representing The Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime and Stepanka Sunkova representing Česká televize. There was also a session by Jacopo Ottaviani, a data journalist specialised in immersive storytelling and cross-border media projects. The special address by Google News Lab was entitled: ‘Getting started with: Google Fusion Tables and Maps, Public Data Explorer, and more.’

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About the Global Editors Network: The Global Editors Network is a cross-platform community empowering newsrooms through programmes designed to inspire, connect and share.